Coming Close to a Conclusion

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Things are starting to wind down with our project at Northwestern University, and it’s a little surreal that we’re in the final stages of conceptualizing a product that we’ll be presenting to the public in the next few weeks.

I remember when it was late September and I was feverishly, along with the help of Kevin Shalvey, trying to design a blog so that we could document the progress of our team as the days passed by. In a way, curating the Local Fourth blog has been a fun experience for me because as I’ve edited and read the submissions of the posts that my fellow team members wrote, I got a good sense of how the project was progressing by reading their thoughts. It was, and still is, fascinating.

Some of the material that’s been written by our group has been phenomenal and enlightening. Hyperlocal news is still evolving, and I think it’s pretty neat that we’re doing our part in trying to make it a more effective and efficient manner for people to get the information that they desire in their respective communities. We don’t have all the answers, but I do know that we have smart and talented people that are doing everything they can to figure things out.

Read some of the posts on this website and you’ll see what I mean.

Published on November 15, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Community Media

Collaboration Tools That Don’t Exist (Yet)

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With any collaborative project, there are the tools that you use to build things and the tools that you use to talk about building things.  For the latter, our project uses some pretty rudimentary tools – Google Docs and a Google Groups-based e-mail list.

These tools are worlds better than the alternative, sharing attachments over e-mail, for two main reasons: they offer a globally accessible location for assets and conversations and the ability to loop new collaborators into those conversations or show them the assets. However, they still leave a lot to be desired for project management tasks like issue tracking, defining milestones and offering a heartbeat of where the project is at in terms of issues or milestones. While we had access to Basecamp and could have tried out a number of tools to handle these tasks, we ultimately decided that we’d rather have everyone using imperfect tools than let the account creation and learning curve of a new tool be a barrier to participation for folks who don’t geek out on finding the perfect tool for a job.

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Published on November 13, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Technology

What’s In a Name?

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A big portion of getting from step 1 to step…well, I’m not sure what number the final step will be, but you get the point. Let’s say in going from A to Z, one of the big steps is deciding a name for this project. We’e played around with “Project Querity,” but there have been some so-so responses to that name.

When demo-ing the site around town there have been some interesting suggestions, but it’s difficult to really encapsulate the entire project in just one phrase. On top of that, the elephant in the room is search engine optimization–we want to make our name catchy but we also want to come up in all the google searches.

Something we were relatively happy with is “search.it,” but we were immediately deterred from that name because .it isn’t very SEO-friendly. And once the issue of SEO came up then we started thinking about the content of the site and it’s lack of “SEO-ness.”

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Published on November 11, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Community Media

Developing User Personas

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As we move from paper prototyping to a live test site, one task we wrapped up this past week was examining our initial group of personas through the lens of the site’s functionality and developing user profiles.

I was initially worried that this process might be somewhat redundant with the creation of the personas themselves, but we were able to find some important new insights and identify blind spots. For example, while a number of our personas could easily be the ‘answerer’ in the Q&A aspect of our site, we couldn’t identify a single definite ‘asker.’ This has further helped us refine our ongoing discussion of balancing moderation and anonymity in the user experience, leading to what I believe are some near-final decisions on that process.

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Published on November 9, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Community Media

Business/Revenue Team Cookbook: A Sneak Peak at Our Introduction

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The Local Fourth Business/Revenue team is nearing the completion of our “cookbook,” a set of steps designed to guide hyperlocal publishers through the process of turning a business out of your website.

We are planning on releasing the full version of our “cookbook” in the next few weeks as a preview to our final presentation. But here’s a sneak peak at the introduction. Enjoy!

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Published on November 8, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Community Media

Really, It’s Worth It

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You’re in the middle of a big project with tight deadlines. Parts of your infrastructure are a little, well, jenky. Do you take the time to make things cleaner and more coherent, or do you focus on coding, hoping that your stack holds together until you have time to clean it up? Will a new tool pay off or is it just a distraction from perhaps more tedious, but more crucial work that needs to be done.

This was my situation early this week when I started looking at our deployment procedure when moving developing on our workstations to making our work public on our webhost. I was working on a bug where things that worked on our development machines weren’t working on the webhost. Instead of just setting up a new instance for testing on our webhost, I decided to invest the time in exploring a new-to-me tool called Fabric.

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Published on November 5, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Technology

A Heads-Up About Head-Down Coding

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I first became acquainted with the term hackathon in college. A computer science student group organized an all-night event in one of the computer labs and ordered in pizza and a seemingly limitless supply of caffeinated soda. I remember the event as fun, but I mostly worked on classwork. I didn’t yet have a backlog of personal hacking projects that could really benefit from hours of uninterrupted coding.

At the start of this project, Shane, Steve and I participated in a mobile hackathon sponsored by The Media Consortium. It was a fun way to familiarize ourselves with our chosen software tools, get used to coding as a team and anticipate some of the hurdles we’d encounter during the innovation project. Though I spend a lot of most days in front of the computer, there’s something pleasurable about having an entire day, or weekend, of frenetic, uninterrupted programming. This might sound like hell to a lot of people, but it’s fundamentally satisfying to building something from scratch and to be able to be fully immersed in a project, really feeling every aspect of the process and design.

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Published on November 4, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Technology

Generalities and Fuzzy Talk

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Over the past two weeks, we (the business team) concentrated our efforts on aggregating and shaping our findings and methods into a “cookbook” — basically a step-by-step guide for other hyperlocal publishers (or wannabes) to develop a viable product and then make money with it.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. This issue of generating revenues off any form of journalism has been dealt with for decades, and needless to say, nobody has yet come up with some kind of shocking solution that propelled us into the next generation of media business models.

So what does the cookbook do? We certainly don’t intend to solve the great mystery overnight (or in 12 weeks), but this cookbook should be accepted as another contribution to the ongoing research that the media industry is pursuing as a whole. In addition, I wanted to point main philosophy that underlies this cookbook. Read more »

Published on November 4, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Business & Industry

An Update on Usability Testing

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As we get further into user-testing the tech team’s first major application with paper prototypes, it gets harder for users not to end up saying, “Isn’t this just like a comment page?”

The truth is that there are many conceptual differences between our application and traditional comment pages that testers don’t fully get recognized using paper tests. Our goal, rather than using the wisdom of crowds to answer journalistic questions, is to explore how crowd wisdom can be transformed into a kind of organized assignment desk for local journalists. At this stage in the testing process, many users aren’t grasping the difference between that concept and a comment page.

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Published on November 4, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Audience Research, Community Media

Role Reversal: The Interviewer Becomes the Interviewee

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Last week I was interviewed by a Medill alumna who is writing an article about the program’s continued commitment to audience research. The story will appear in a future issue of Medill Magazine.

Christina started out by asking me why I’m personally so interested in audience research; naturally, this got me talking about the Audience Insight class taught by Rachel Davis Mersey here at Medill. I took Rachel’s class this past summer. I was already interested in audience understanding before taking the course; afterward, I knew I wanted to be part of the audience research team for the Fall 2010 innovation project and put my new skills to use.

We talked about the struggles, like how difficult and frustrating it can be to conduct man-on-the-street interviews with Evanston residents. People are busy, and they don’t always have time to stop for five to 10 minutes and answer a graduate student’s questions. Especially if they don’t understand the project or appreciate the value of local news. That portion of our audience research was arguably the most difficult.

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Published on November 2, 2010 12:00 pm.
Filed under: Audience Research